The Real World of Law Practice

Clinical Faculty

Our full-time clinical faculty are scholar-practitioners with a wide range of specialties including employment law, immigration law, telecommunications and mortgage finance. They combine teaching and supervision of clinical students with writing and lecturing.

Our adjunct faculty, drawn from the New York legal community, are experienced lawyers and supervisors in a wide range of law offices, agencies and judicial chambers. Although working full-time at their respective jobs, they are dedicated to the education of our students.

Jonathan Askin, is the Founding Director of the Brooklyn Law Incubator Project (BLIP), which functions like a law firm, and represents Internet, new media, communications and other tech entrepreneurs and innovators. He has 15 years of experience in the communications industry in both the public and private sectors. Askin has provided legal and policy counsel and strategic advice for companies that build and develop networks and Internet applications. A sought-after expert in the field of Internet law, he played a key role in the tech task force of President Barack Obama’s election campaign.

Natalie Chin joined the Law School this Fall as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Law and Faculty Director of the new AAIDD clinic, which will provide legal services to adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She was most recently a Clinical Teaching Fellow in the Guardianship Clinic at Cardozo School of Law, where she taught a seminar on Article 81 Guardianship law and its intersection with housing rights, public benefits, and disability rights and supervised law students representing clients in all aspects of guardianship and related proceedings in state and federal court.

Prior to her teaching career, Professor Chin was a devoted public interest attorney.

Jodi S. Balsam directs the Law School’s Civil Externship Programs, and also teaches the Civil Externship Seminar. She has also taught lawyering skills and sports law courses, building on her 20 years of experience as a litigator and in-house counsel at the National Football League.

Debra Bechtel, one of New York’s foremost experts in low-income or limited equity co-ops, has directed the Corporate and Real Estate Clinic since 1997. She has over 20 years of experience in the areas of real estate law and community development.

Stacy Caplow is the director of the Law School’s Clinical Education Program and co-director of the Safe Harbor Project. A leader in the field of clinical legal education, she has worked abroad to help augment the clinical curriculum for LLB and LLM students at the University College Cork Faculty of Law, and with a refugee center in Cork. Caplow also spent a semester at the University of Hong Kong helping to establish its first legal clinic.

Minna Kotkin has extensive litigation experience handling a range of civil rights law reform and class action suits. She served as Litigation Director for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest for many years, and has taught several different clinics at the Law School over the past two decades. She currently teaches the Employment Law Clinic.

Professor Susan Hazeldean is the founder and director of the Brooklyn Law School LGBT Advocacy Clinic. Students in the clinic will represent LGBT individuals in immigration and prisoners’ rights cases as well as undertake advocacy projects to advance LGBT equality.

Professor Kate Mogulescu joined Brooklyn Law School in fall 2017 as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Law after 14 years with The Legal Aid Society, where she served as a supervising attorney in the Criminal Defense Practice. Her work and scholarship focus largely on gender issues in the criminal legal system, with special attention to human trafficking. In 2011, she founded the Exploitation Intervention Project, which represents victims of trafficking and exploitation and sex workers who are prosecuted in New York City. She also developed and continues to lead the Survivor Reentry Project at the American Bar Association Commission on Domestic & Sexual Violence, a national training and technical assistance initiative on post-conviction advocacy for survivors of trafficking.

Professor Amy Mulzer is a staff attorney and instructor of clinical law in the Disability and Civil Rights Clinic: Advocating for Adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities at Brooklyn Law School. Previously, she was an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at NYU School of Law.

Karen Porter is the executive director of Brooklyn Law School’s Center for Health, Science, and Public Policy, and she teaches the Health Law Clinic. She has taught courses at Washington University Law School on law and medicine, and AIDS and the law, and is the author of numerous publications related to AIDS policy.

David Reiss directs Brooklyn Law School’s Community Development Clinic and teaches real estate finance and property law. His prior experience includes practicing law in several firms’ real estate and land use departments; Reiss also serves on several local community boards.

Dan Smulian co-teaches the Safe Harbor Clinic and has a strong background in public interest legal work. A former director of training and legal services at the New York Immigration Coalition, he managed a statewide program that provides seminars and educational events on immigration law and immigrants’ rights issues for immigrant communities.

Marjorie S. White joins the faculty as an Associate Professor of Clinical Law, to work with the Brooklyn Law School Incubator and Policy Clinic (BLIP) and the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship (CUBE). Professor White has extensive experience in private practice, including both at law firms as well as in executive in-house positions. She spent much of her career in the corporate department of Davis Polk & Wardwell, where she focused on mergers and acquisitions, securities work and private equity transactions. She was also a partner in the corporate department of Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen. Professor White served as Vice President and Corporate Secretary of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, the global investment bank, where she was responsible for worldwide corporate governance as well as related public company work. She was also the General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer of a boutique investment advisory firm, where she oversaw legal and compliance matters.